ARID AGRICULTURE. 313 



something about suitable foods for different pur- 

 poses, and one of the principal guides they had 

 was the appetite of the animals themselves. 



If a man is working hard and the weather is 

 very cold, he will crave that kind of food which 

 will supply the fat which may be converted into 

 heat and work. The Esquimo lives on whale 

 blubber and other fat substances, even the tallow 

 candle being a delicacy. Such foods would very 

 quickly nauseate a person living in a warm 

 country. Therefore, the actual needs of the 

 body tell the man who knows nothing about 

 science what kind of food to eat. This was easy 

 to apply to the intelligent thinking man, but dif- 

 ficult when it came to feeding dumb brutes. 



The first attempt to compare feeding stuffs 

 was made nearly 100 years ago. One hundred 

 pounds of meadow hay was taken as a standard 

 of comparison and was said to be worth so 

 many pounds of other foods, as cabbage, pota- 

 toes, clover or grain. The trouble was that no 

 one could agree on how many pounds of any 

 food was equivalent to 100 pounds of meadow 

 hay, and everyone used different standards. 



This crude beginning set people to thinking 

 and paved the way for better systems of deter- 

 mining the values of farm food stuffs. Attempts 

 to divide feeding stuffs into different classes of 

 compounds were not made until about 50 years 

 ago, when Grouven's feeding standard for farm 

 animals, based on the protein, carbo-hydrates 



